Journal of Business Models (2016), Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 1-4 1 Editorial: New Ways of Developing and Analyzing Business Model Innovation Please cite this paper as: Lüttgens & Montemari (2016), Editorial: New Ways of Developing and Analyzing Business Model Innovation, Jour- nal of Business Models, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 1-4 1 RWTH Aachen, Technology and Innovation Management, Germany; luettgens@time.rwth-aachen.de 2 Università Politecnica delle Marche, Department of Management, Italy; m.montemari@univpm.it Guest Editors: Dirk Lüttgens 1 and Marco Montemari 2 The highly competitive, hyper-dynamic, and global business environment has tremendously increased companies’ awareness of the relevance of Business Model (BM) innovation (Taran et al., 2016). Companies are forced to rethink and innovate their BMs more fre- quently and more radically because of ever-shorter life- cycles of products, services, competencies, and work tasks, on the one hand, and highly competitive condi- tions, on the other (Sosna et al., 2010; Achtenhagen et al., 2013). Over the last few years, large and successful companies have been coming to the realization that their current BMs could rapidly become obsolete in the face of com- petitors who are adopting new and disruptive emerg- ing technologies or BMs (Cavalcante, 2013). Despite the understanding that BM innovation is of great concern to managers and practitioners who aim to secure com- petitive positioning of their companies in the market place, many issues regarding how the existing BMs can be refined, redefined, and renewed need to be further investigated. The following questions were posed to potential contributors: • How can companies identify disruptive BMs? • What determines successful pioneer and follower strategies with BM innovations? • How can companies use patterns as tools for de- veloping BMs? • How can a transformation of the existing BM be or- ganized to lead companies to success? • Which kind of tools, solutions, frameworks, organizational choices and managerial practices can be used to support BM innovation? The aim of this Special Issue is to expand and advance the current knowledge on these aspects, highlighting work that makes significant theoretical and empirical advances on new ways of developing and analyzing BM innovation. Consistently with this aim, the papers included in this Special Issue address several different new facets and aspects of BM innovation, thus adding new perspectives to this research stream. Beyond the question of how new BMs can be gener- ated systematically, one of the biggest issues for com- panies is whether or not their BM still fits the market Journal of Business Models (2016), Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 1-4 2 requirements. In particular, how can managers roughly gauge the performance of their company and their un- derlying BM? In the paper by Schüle et al. an assess- ment framework is developed with the support of six construction companies. It can be seen as a starting point for a deeper analysis of a company’s BM and as an initial activity that helps to direct a change process within a company. The assessment consists of 19 dif- ferent design fields which were additionally structured by means of Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas. Managers will be able to utilize the tool in the future as it allows them to conduct a “health check” of their company’s BM. Developing new BMs is a risky and uncertain task. If managers know that they have to change their BM, what often remains uncertain is how many and which elements of it they need to change. This question is the starting point of the paper by Lüttgens and Diener which aims, first, to shed light on how companies are able to overcome BM threats by using BM patterns and second, link these to the value dimensions of a BM. The idea is that innovative BMs can be created by re- arranging and composing existing patterns. Based on the 55 different BM patterns identified by Gassmann et al. (2014), Lüttgens and Diener analyze the effect of such patterns against the threats to a BM by using Porter’s five forces. The Porter framework describes the competitive forces within an industry and can help to analyze the strength of threats to a company. The quantitative study analyses how BM patterns can be combined in order to counteract Porter’s five forces and to create successful BMs. As a result of this study, managers are able to not only react to different threats in a systematic way, but also to help companies use systematic combinations of these patterns to mitigate the threats. Complementary to the already existing view of BM in- novation as a singular and separate management task within one organizational unit, the paper by Sachsen- hofer analyses the concept of BM portfolios in large firms. Large firms have to face several challenges when they start to change their BM logic. In particular, they must consider whether and how changing certain ele- ments of BM A influences elements from BM B within the same company. Therefore, the management of BM portfolios opens up a wide range of managerial possi- bilities. Managers of corporate BMs are no longer lim- ited by an option space that comprises only restraint, incremental improvement, or abandonment of the ex- isting BM. In order to map the opportunities of develop- ing BM portfolios, Sachsenhofer looks at several auto- motive corporations and their operations. He evaluates the scope of their production in terms of what opera- tions, in the wider ecosystem revolving around the car, are done within the firm and which ones are usually done outside it. In the end, for practical purposes and to show the different types of BM portfolio logics, the BMW AG case offers both a broadened scope of types of interrelation as well as a concise logic of how they interact. Based on this analysis, Sachsenhofer defines four different types of managerial actions for manag- ing BM portfolios: BM reconfiguration, BM innovation, BM elimination, and BM coordination. Finally, when it comes to designing and implementing a process of BM innovation, the demand-side can also play a relevant role. The paper by Zalewska-Kurek et al. aims to explore how both the market and poten- tial customers can influence decisions concerning BM innovation. While the idea of involving consumers in the creation of value is not new and dates back to the 1980s, BM literature often sees the customers only as the addressees of products and services and, therefore, it does not keep up with the demand of firms to inte- grate customers in the development of BMs. By gath- ering data from nine firms through interviews and ana- lyzing the data collected by using the grounded-theory method, the Authors identify two emerging themes: one regards engaging with the market and the other concerns experimentation with BMs and changes made after reviewing the situation on the market (the firm’s responsiveness). Taken together, firm responsiveness and market engagement are used to establish four cat- egories of firm types: passive, active, unfocused, and focused. The Authors observe that experimenting with BMs is high in the first phases of life and dwindles to nearly nothing in the market introduction phase. En- gaging the market also changes over time, going from being less engaged at the start to having more interac- tion with customers and/or users at the end. In closing, it can be stated that the field of research concerning BM innovation is currently in a consolida- tion phase; while it still contains several research gaps, Journal of Business Models (2016), Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 1-4 3 it also offers many possibilities for future research. In our opinion, the following four avenues for future re- search on BM innovation could be particularly fruitful: • Developing and enriching the patterns library: fur- ther research is necessary in order to complete the library of BM patterns and to create a tool similar to the well-known TRIZ (“Theory of Inventive Prob- lem Solving”) approach. TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, which relies on the study of patterns of problems and solutions. It is based on the assumption that “somebody some- where has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it)”; • Developing web-based applications: existing tools mostly exist in offline versions which hinder both communication and collaboration outside of enti- ties as well as organizational implementation. Fur- thermore, both existing web-based applications and offline tools are, in most cases, stand-alone solutions. Further research should invest in devel- oping integrative web-based applications for the development of new BMs. Therefore, BM research- ers should learn from the OSS literature stream, which offers several approaches for open develop- ment; • Looking more closely at the performance implica- tions of changing a company’s BM: our assumption for future research is that certain types of behavior in terms of BM innovation will lead to differences in performance (e.g., faster time to market, high- er customer satisfaction, higher revenues, lower costs); • Exploring the levers and the barriers that can en- able or hinder the process of BM innovation: future research is needed in order to understand what ac- tually happens in companies in which a process of BM innovation is implemented, to provide insight on what works and does not work, as well as on the reasons for negative or positive experiences. We hope that the reader will find the papers included in this Special Issue of interest. We would also like to thank all of the reviewers who contributed with their time, effort, and comments to push the Authors to do their best. Our special thanks go to Professor Christian Nielsen, for his support during the production of this Special Issue. Reference list Achtenhagen, L., Melin, L. & Naldi, L. (2013), Dynamics of Business Models – Strategizing, Critical Capabilities and Activities for Sustained Value Creation, Long Range Planning, Vol. 46, No. 6, pp. 427-42. Cavalcante, S.A. (2013), Understanding the Impact of Technology on Firms’ Business Models, European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 285-300. Gassmann, H., Frankenberger, K. & Csik, M. (2014), The Business Model Navigator, Pearson Education Limited, Har- low. Sosna, M., Trevinyo-Rodríguez, R.N. & Velamuri, S.R. (2010), Business Model Innovation through Trial-and-Error Learning: The Naturhouse Case, Long Range Planning, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 383-407. Taran, Y., Nielsen, C., Montemari, M., Thomsen, P. & Paolone, F. (2016), Business Model Configurations: A Five-V Framework to Map Out Potential Innovation Routes, European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 492-527. Journal of Business Models (2016), Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 1-4 4 Dr. Dirk Lüttgens is an assistant professor in the Research Area TIME (Technology, Inno- vation, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship) at RWTH Aachen University and was a visiting scholar at the Haas School of Business, Uni- versity of Berkeley, CA. His research focuses on open innovation, business model innova- tion, and the implications of the current digi- tal transformation on firms. Dirk obtained a Ph.D. in innovation management from RWTH Aachen University. He also worked at the Uni- versity of Applied Sciences in Luzern, Swit- zerland, and has been a lecturer in several executive programs. Dirk’s research has been published amongst others in Journal of Prod- uct Innovation Management and Journal of Business Economics. Marco Montemari, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ita- ly), School of Economics “G. Fuà”. He was a vis- iting Research Fellow at the Business Model Design Center, Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests concern management accounting, business models and intellectual capital. Other relevant interests concern bal- anced scorecard and performance measure- ment systems in general, overall with regard to their design and implementation process and to their ability to map and measure the value creation process. Marco’s research has been published, amongst others, in Journal of Intellectual Capital and European Journal of In- novation Management. About the Authors